Richard Gaskin wrote:
Martin Baxter wrote:
Does it not also have to do with being able to discern subtleties of
shadow detail on-screen? Uncorrected CRT Gamma (as per Win / Nix /
Television) gives a very non-linear display and tends to compress the
bottom 20% to black.
It's a tradeoff: the Apple gamma may give more detail among darker
colors, but at the loss of detail among lighter ones. The default gamma
for Macs is so light that the whole thing looks washed out to me; the
first thing I do when I get a new Mac is make it readable by increasing
the gamma.
We can't rule out the possibility that the entire world outside of 1
Infinite Loop may not be wrong.
Ah, but, I would say the point is that the lighter values are
over-represented in the first place, gamma correction just helps to give
the shadows a bit more of a look-in.
When I used to teach Photoshop I would sometimes have students bring in
images they'd made on their PC's at home. They would be disgruntled
because their images looked all washed-out on the Mac.
Then I would have them examine the histogram of their image data, which
would always turn out to have no pixel values lower than about 35,35,35
and sometimes worse than that, nothing lower than 40 or 50. Why in that
case should the computer display any black?
Colour-management is supposed to get around these issues as far as
possible, and it does a great job when set up correctly. But in the
wider world where systems are generally uncalibrated, uncorrected, badly
adjusted, badly-sited, old, cheap, mobile and so on, it's rather
irrelevant. None of my equipment is what I'd consider calibrated in
fact, how about yours?
As for Apple the company, there is plenty to criticise, no argument from
me on that. However, when it comes to gamma, both Mac and PC users are
free to set whatever gamma they like, if they care. I suspect that
Apple's print industry customers do prefer their system with a bit of
gamma correction. Web site makers like yours truly just have to be aware
of the real world and compromise as best we can IMO.
Still I can talk big, but here I am sitting at a Win XP system with the
gamma set to 1.0 (linear) whatever that actually means. And it looks OK
to me. Maybe I need eye surgery. (or soon will) ;-)
Martin Baxter
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